As Anthony jury selection starts today, those chosen will put lives on hold

May 8, 2011|By Amy Pavuk, Orlando Sentinel

When the jurors chosen to serve in the Casey Anthony trial are brought to Orlando, their lives will be put on hold.

The 20 — 12 jurors and eight alternates — will be sequestered. And that can be personally and emotionally taxing.

The court system will put the jurors up in a hotel, feed and transport them back and forth to proceedings. For two months — or as long as the trial takes — the jurors will face many restrictions on where they can go, what they read and watch on TV, and even how often they can speak to family members.

The high-profile nature of the Anthony case and its seemingly endless pretrial publicity has made it almost a no-brainer that the jury would be sequestered.

"The idea of sequestration is to ensure that the jury is not improperly influenced by information that exists outside the courtroom," said Charles Rose, a professor at Stetson University College of Law. "What you're trying to do is control the information to the jury."

Florida law requires jurors in capital cases be sequestered during deliberations. But nothing mandates that a jury be sequestered during the entire trial. That is up to the judge.

And in Anthony's case, Orange-Osceola Chief Judge Belvin Perry has decided the jurors will be sequestered — at a cost of about $360,000.

It has been about 20 years since Orange County has sequestered a jury for the duration of a trial.

"They have to be removed from the flow of information," Rose said. "That used to be relatively easy to do. It is now a nightmare."

Difficult to seat a jury

As soon as 2-year-old Caylee Marie Anthony went missing in the summer of 2008, the case was thrust into the national spotlight. The publicity snowballed as mounds of photos and evidence against her mother, Casey Anthony, were released.

Orlando jury consultant Susan Constantine said sequestration is an excellent idea for jurors in the Anthony case.

"In a case like this, you don't really have another choice," she said, adding that sequestered juries are even more difficult to seat. "I think it's going to be a real hard thing to find someone who will give up their life for two months."

Seating a jury in the John Couey trial four years ago in Miami proved challenging.

Couey was charged in the 2005 abduction, rape and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford in Citrus County. The trial was moved to Miami because of the extensive media coverage.

During jury selection, a woman's ferret got her out of duty — she said her pet would be left alone if she were sequestered for several weeks to hear the case.

A jury was eventually seated and was sequestered for about three weeks.

Torrell Mathis, a married father of three from Leisure City, was one of those jurors.

He said the jury members stayed on a single floor at a hotel. They had a designated eating area, and another area where they could watch movies and play cards and board games.

Security was very tight — officers guarded the elevator in case anyone tried to gain access to the floor, Mathis said.

Mathis says now that the sequestration accomplished what it was designed to do.

"They had us there so that we would not be persuaded in any kind of way," he said. "Being sequestered kept us focused on what we were doing. It isolates you from what's going on."

Another juror who served on the Couey case, who spoke with the Orlando Sentinel on the condition of anonymity, said she thinks being sequestered made the trial less hectic.

"To be careful of what you said and careful of what you see just would have been a whole lot more stressful," she said.

Being sequestered also helped protect jurors from the media covering the trial.

'Life or death is on the line'

Life for the Anthony jury during the trial won't be easy.

More than 500 members of the local and national media have requested credentials to attend part or all of the proceedings. The scene outside the courthouse, and in the vacant lot across the street — which will be transformed into a media village of sorts — is sure to be a circus.

Capital cases are stressful for jurors, even when they are not sequestered; Anthony faces death if she is convicted on the first-degree murder charge.

"It has to be unnerving at best, and potentially quite unsettling, to be whisked away from your support system, job and other means of doing business," said James Acker, a professor at the University at Albany School of Criminal Justice in New York. "Day-to-day involvement in a trial where somebody's guilt, innocence, life or death is on the line — that just has to enhance pressures."

The Couey juror who asked not to be identified said she sat so close to the evidence she could have reached out and touched the items, including the mattress where Couey sexually assaulted 9-year-old Jessica.